Age of Autism Weekly Wrap: How to Not Connect the Dots
By Dan Olmsted
After 9/11, there was much discussion about why the experts – the people paid to make sense of seemingly random bits of data before they coalesced into a horrific attack on our “homeland” – failed to “connect the dots” in time to do anything. Al Qaeda’s determination to attack; an attempt to take flying lessons in Minneapolis; a bunch of “students” here on expired visas no one followed up on … such were the signs that in retrospect were flashing a warning.
Today, we have another pattern of dots that are also signaling a warning – a warning that our country is in the process of being attacked and undermined in quite a different, but no less destructive, way. Every day when I read the paper or watch the news I see these signs flashing and the people who are paid to interpret them – to recognize patterns and act on our behalf – asleep at the switch, or even deliberately looking away.
Let’s take two dots and see how the connect.
Dot One: This week, The New York Times ran an article titled, “A Link Between Fidgety Boys and a Sputtering Economy.” The reporter, David Leonhardt, wrote: “The gap in behavioral skills between young girls and boys is even bigger than the gap between rich and poor.
“By kindergarten, girls are substantially more attentive, better behaved, more sensitive, more persistent, more flexible and more independent than boys, according to a new paper from Third Way, a Washington research group.”
Leonhardt linked this, and rightly so, to the decline of the middle class in the U.S., citing the recent report that Canada is thriving by comparison. And it’s the failure of boys to compete that has led to this loss – “These depressing trends have many causes, but the social struggles of men and boys are an important one. If the United States is going to build a better-functioning economy than the one we’ve had over the last 15 years, we’re going to have to solve our boy problems.”
Problem identified -- so far, so good. Yet Leonhardt lapses into the kind of vague speculation masquerading as wise observation into which these kinds of stories usually fall. He cites experts who say boys respond even more than girls to better instruction, so improving our schools must be (as ever) the obvious taxpayer-funded answer. “When good grades bring high status, boys respond.”
Then there’s the schools-don’t-teach-boys-right school. They are forced to “sit still for hours every day” and don’t have good role models (i.e., women can’t teach boys, a stupid and sexist assumption, especially because almost all teachers were single women back in the good old days of boys doing well in school). Oh, and “as the economy continues to shift away from brawn and toward brains, many men have struggled with the transition.”
Whatever, bro.
When I looked at the paper on which the NYT piece was based, I found even more pseudo-explanations, including that “boys are more negatively affected than girls by growing up in families with absent or less educated fathers.”
Yeah, to play off Saturday Night Live, those are the tickets! The usual suspects – absent fathers, less educated family backgrounds, poor schools, chicks for teachers – are trotted out to explain something that nonetheless affects only boys!
The glaring omission here, of course, is that we already know boys are much more prone to neurodevelopmental/learning disorders, namely ADD, ADHD, and autism. This is not mere sociologically induced “fidgetiness.” Boys show up at school with serious, serious impairments already wired into their brains and bodies. If 1 in 6 children today have such disorders – and they do -- and if those disorders predominantly favor males – and they do – you can’t simply bypass those facts in favor of your own pet educational theories.
Just to take ADHD, the CDC reports that 11 percent of all children 4 to 17 years old (that’s 6.4 million) have been diagnosed with ADHD as of 2011; that the numbers increase every year; and that boys, at 13.2 percent, were nearly three times as likely than girls, at 5.6 percent, to have the diagnosis. I’ve seen much higher ratios elsewhere.
And, as the CDC notes, “We know that ADHD causes problems in how well children do in school, in their ability to make and keep friends, and function in society.”
But what is causing this condition, a condition that’s increasing, that predominantly afflicts boys, and that negatively affects both them and society at large? Let’s give the National Institutes of Health explanations:
“No one knows for sure. ADHD probably stems from interactions between genes and environmental or non-genetic factors.
“ADHD often runs in families. Researchers have found that much of the risk of having ADHD has to do with genes. Many genes are linked to ADHD, and each gene plays a small role in the disorder. ADHD is very complex and a genetic test for diagnosing the disorder is not yet available.
“Among the non-genetic factors that may increase a child’s risk for developing ADHD are:
Smoking or drinking during pregnancy
Birth complications or very low birth weight
Exposure to lead or other toxic substances
Extreme neglect, abuse, or social deprivation.
Food additives like artificial coloring, which might make hyperactivity worse.
Some studies suggest that artificial food additives and dyes may worsen hyperactivity and inattention, but these effects are small and do not account for most cases of ADHD.”
Say, where’s the stuff about absent fathers, clueless teaching methods and poor academic standards? They’re nowhere to be found – because this condition is not the product of those things. But the NIH explanation isn’t doing much for me, either, because while, after using variations of the word “gene” seven times, it acknowledges that ADHD probably has environmental elements, the list manages to avoid the likely suspects. (Maybe they fall under “other toxic substances,” like Al Capone might fall under “other gangsters in Chicago in the 1920s.”)
Which brings us to Dot Two: In March, The Nation magazine – which, because I am unapologetic progressive, I subscribe to – published a cover story titled “Warning Signs: How Pesticides Harm the Young Brain.”
It profiled a study under way among migrant women and their children in California’s Salinas Valley, looking at the effects of maternal and infant exposure to pesticides. The study is documenting alarming outcomes:
“From infancy on, the children of the mothers with the highest levels of organophosphates were at the greatest risk for neurodevelopmental problems. That association was present at every stage the researchers checked in on the kids. At 6 months, they were more likely to have poorer reflexes. At 2, they were at higher risk for pervasive developmental disorder, an autism-related condition, like Asperger’s, in which children have trouble connecting to others. At 5, they were more likely to be hyperactive and have trouble paying attention. At 7, they scored lower on IQ tests, by an average of seven points—the equivalent of being a half-year behind their peers.”
Of course, this does not single out boys. But note the risk for autism, a/k/a PDD, which does –autism “favors” boys by an even higher margin than ADHD. And this takes us right back to the New York Times' concern, that we're falling behind economically and globally:
“'Losing several IQ points isn’t such a big deal for an individual, but at a population level that collective drop in brainpower has enormous social and economic implications. 'If one child loses seven IQ points, the teacher may not notice, the parent may not notice. But if 100,000 kids have a loss of seven points, the economy notices,' says Leonardo Trasande, a pediatrician and environmental health specialist at the New York University School of Medicine.
“By one expert’s calculation, even a five-point drop in IQ translates into a 50 percent increase in the number of functionally disabled adults (from 6 million to 9.4 million) and a 50 percent decrease in the number of gifted people (from 6 million to 2.6 million). That shift can bring a host of ripple effects, from an increased number of school kids needing special education to fewer workers capable of complex tasks or high-level decision-making. Experts see parallels between the cognitive effects of organophosphate pesticides and lead poisoning, which causes roughly the same IQ drop. When [the study leader] looked at the economic impacts of lead poisoning, he found that it cost the United States $51 billion annually in lost economic productivity.”
Now, it’s not exactly a news bulletin that studies link ADHD, autism, Parkinson’s and so on to pesticide exposure, both on the population level and at home; one of the most interesting – and scariest – studies found that pregnant moms who used flea-killing pet shampoo while pregnant had a higher risk of their child being diagnosed with autism.
So why can't anybody connect these two dots -- boys are falling farther and father behind, and environmental toxins seem to be an important part of the picture? I suspect that lurking beneath this aversion to linking toxins, particularly pesticides, to the trouble with boys – and its scary implications for American competitiveness – is the specter of autism. It’s the ultimate neurodevelopmental nightmare, and the toxin that so many parents point to is the bloated CDC vaccination schedule. (I had an eye-rolling moment this week when the National Consumers League reported on the findings of its own new poll: “Survey: One third of American parents mistakenly link vaccines to autism.” They couldn’t even report the findings without running for cover by blaming the poor parents for offering such a stupid point of view in response to their own question! I imagine the pollster asking, "Do you mistakenly believe vaccines cause autism based on the mistaken observation of your own lying eyes, because you're a credulous believer in junk science?")
Setting aside vaccines for a second, I can vouch for the fact that autism and pesticides are very much linked: In the first cases of autism reported in the medical literature, intense pesticide exposure in the family background was very much in evidence, according to reporting Mark Blaxill and I did for our book, The Age of Autism – Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-made Epidemic. That exposure came in the form of the new ethyl mercury pesticides first used in the 1930s, when those first children were born. (Check out the 10-minute video on our home page, “How Mercury Triggered the Age of Autism.”)
The medical-industrial complex began using the same mercury compound in childhood vaccines at the same time. Unforgivably, it still does. Of those first 11 children in the case study, eight were boys, a ratio that has obtained ever since and carries over to ADHD etcetera. Why boys are more vulnerable is unclear -- testosterone probably potentiates toxins, and males in general are, contrary to stereotype, more medically vulnerable than women; witness the latter's greater longevity.
As I said at the start, when you connect just two dots, you see an environmentally – in fact, medically – induced catastrophe looming over our fair land, one whose outlines first emerged decades ago, with autism.. It’s damaging children, mostly boys. It’s hurting their chances for a better life than their parents had. It’s hurting our chances on the global stage. Mark Blaxill made this point powerfully last year at Autism One in a talk titled, “The Great American Regression,” which involves falling behind not just economically but in terms of infant mortality and all kinds of other health outcomes.
And it’s hurting all of us when we have to sit and read about absent fathers, clueless schools and other nonsense as the catastrophe looms larger every day. One thing for sure about two dots -- the shortest distance between them is a straight line. But mainstream medicine, journalism and education seem unable or unwilling to go there.
--
Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism.
I’m with Eileen. What ever happened to millions of years of mammalian evolution, in which the placenta was still kicking in for a while after birth (perhaps providing stem cells as well as oxygen)? Why is the cord cut so soon?
I quote George Maxwell, Principles of Paediatrics, 1977:
“Nervous impulses, sent out from the respiratory centre in the brain stem, are intended to stimulate the muscles of breathing. The impulses occur before birth, but are weak until the moment of birth when the baby’s face and body receive sensory stimuli. …The first effective breath is the “first gasp,” followed by deeper gasps which culminate in regular breathing. At this stage the alveoli are fully expanded and receive an adequate blood supply, so that oxygen can be supplied to the tissues, carbon dioxide removed from them, and acid base balance be maintained.”
Who makes hospital policy? What is “a hospital”? I know what a doctor is; it’s a man or woman. Does “hospital policy” mean 3 out of 5 persons who sat at committee voted for immediate cord clamping? There’s no obvious Pharma villain to blame here! Couldn’t they have looked at Nature and said “Hey, maybe God knew what He was doing when He organized natural clamping?” What motivates these decisions?
In each of the 50 states, the Secretary of State keeps an open record of the owners and officers of all corporations. You can look up who owns your hospital. You may be in for a shock.
Posted by: Mary W Maxwell, PhD, LLB | May 07, 2014 at 12:10 AM
I see it in the schools. All this environmentally caused damage is not playing out well & we would be advised to get it under control. Of course the first step would be to admit there is a serious problem with our school kids.
Posted by: Jen | May 05, 2014 at 04:02 PM
Betty Bona
You mean the genie is out of the bottle!
I agree.
Posted by: Benedetta | May 05, 2014 at 11:42 AM
What I mean to say is that the cultural factors mentioned above and especially the ones that might induce some biological activity could seem significant, but if the vaccines were removed, we wouldn't see any significance.
Posted by: Betty Bona | May 05, 2014 at 10:57 AM
Some people explain the fall in student performance (in general - not particularly male) to greater stress in the lives of young people. At least this is biological in that extreme or prolonged stress can cause changes in cortisol levels. Still, I think this explanation is just used to draw attention away from the real causes we should be addressing. I remember a study several years ago that found women who were pregnant while living through one of the major hurricanes (I think in New Orleans) were more likely to have children later diagnosed with autism. Sure, I'll buy that. Maybe the change in cortisol levels can make a difference to these babies. I view it as another factor that loads the gun making these babies more susceptible to vaccine injury. The follow-up study I would have liked to see is whether children born to moms pregnant while living through a hurricane in areas with no vaccines suffer the same fate. I don't think they would which means we can't just look at genetics to determine which children are susceptible to vaccine injury.
Posted by: Betty Bona | May 05, 2014 at 10:51 AM
Really interesting article. I don't get why the vague psycho-social explanations persist. Isn't it obviously biochemical or metabolic, yet that possibility is not even mentioned. Very puzzling. Even intelligent reporters just don't seem to get it. I think Freudian psychiatry still holds the country in thrall, this idea that everything relates to relationships. There never has been much proof for this but people keep up with it to this day. It makes a good story. We are living in poetic, storybook times with missing fathers, mean lady schoolmarms, poverty. My father had all of those things yet fought with heroism in a war, became a professional and raised three kids. His parents didn't even speak English! Boys really are struggling now, but in many material ways they have it better.
Posted by: Jessica | May 04, 2014 at 10:04 PM
Bob,
We also have an obesity epidemic and our supermarkets are filled to the brim with genetically modified "food". The rising maternal illness and mortality rates may be connected to those variables. And can't forget the omnipresent wireless radiation exposure that is a trillion times greater than what we evolved with. We may be seeing the results of that mass, uncontrolled experiment too.
Posted by: Linda | May 04, 2014 at 05:24 PM
Back in the 1970s for my dissertation research I chose to investigate the effects of neonatal asphyxia in laboratory rats. Immediately noticeable was growth retardation, which was more significant in male rats. Then following maturation brain serotonin was affected in males. (See Simon & Volicer, Neonatal asphyxia in the rat: Greater vulnerability of males and persistent effects on brain monoamine synthesis. J.Neurochem 26:893, 1976).
It should be common knowledge that metabolism is higher in males than females. Females do not compete with males in athletic events like running and swimming. Need for ongoing aerobic energy is higher in males. Therefore, males will be more susceptible to injury from a lapse in oxygen delivery at birth. Connect the dots??? Clamping the umbilical cord immediately after birth is far more likely to cause harm to male infants. This procedure needs to be stopped.
Clamping the cord terminates blood flow to and from the placenta. The anatomy of the heart must change before blood flow to the lungs is fully established. Male infants are especially vulnerable to a lapse in respiration after birth. How can “medical authorities” be trusted on any matter, when they permit (and promote) clamping off the lifeline at birth???
Posted by: Eileen Nicole Simon | May 04, 2014 at 03:28 PM
Why isn't it considered by most that some dots are more likely to be connected by non "experts" than the reverse? This post brings up this confrontation of two models of scientific advancement:
http://www.autism.com/ari/newsletter/144/page3.pdf
There seems to be an institutional fostering of mental brick walls between valued products or practices and their potential adverse effects that prevent those who feel most qualified to connect dots from doing better than a convoluted, round-about approach that results in at most hacking away at leaves as far away as possible from the roots of the problem or in wasting time addressing adjacent issues, co-morbid symptoms just in case it improves something (or just to be seen doing something perhaps).
How do we stop empowering such who claim expertise in areas that they cannot or actually refuse to scrutinize? It bugged me to no end from the beginning of looking into the vaccine autism link to read how parents (professionals in various fields really) who saw major parallels between mercury poisoning and autism felt they had to dress up that information in certain jargon and had to publish it in some esteemed "peer-reviewed" journal or other, just to be heard. I wonder if we need to move away from the dogmatic practice of going to "the experts," the institutionally approved experts anyway, if we ever want to make progress, especially in understanding iatrogenic causation.
Posted by: Jeannette Bishop | May 04, 2014 at 02:33 PM
http://www.japantoday.com/category/lifestyle/view/increasing-number-of-japanese-men-opting-for-bachelorhood
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/12/14/barely-half-of-u-s-adults-are-married-a-record-low/
But not to worry there are valid reasons for young men not to get married.
It is too hard to make a living for a family that might come along.
It will take time away from video games.
Geee and in the past that stopped them when they nothing but dirt to eat and had to got to work in the steel factory going up hill both ways.
Posted by: Benedetta | May 03, 2014 at 07:10 PM
I think the school systems would have very good records on what has happened to boys the past 20 years.
The increasing number of female valedictorians. Male / female ratios of the top 10% of students in each class. Tests for admission to law and med schools.
It would all add up to the same thing which has been provided by 36 vaccines to age 5.
Posted by: cmo | May 03, 2014 at 06:20 PM
More dangling dots go unconnected .. USA Today ran an item .. "US one of few countries with rise in maternal deaths" .. which informs us ..
"The United States is one of just eight countries in the world where deaths related to pregnancy and childbirth rose between 2003 and 2013 .. putting it in the company of Afghanistan, Belize and El Salvador. While the US maternal mortality rates remain lower than those in many poor countries, they are much higher than those in developed countries ranging from the U.K. to Saudi Arabia".
The CDC says "better tracking of such deaths may play a role .. but .. the CDC also says growing numbers of women enter pregnancy with conditions such as hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease, putting them at higher risk for complications ... it certainly seems plausible that one of the underlying causes is that more mothers are ill when they start their pregnancies".
Is it possible the failure of the FDA to recognize the difference between the sexes .. when treating pregnant women by prescribing drugs in the same dose as prescribed for males .. to treat hypertension, diabetes and heart disease .. may be a contributing factor to increasing deaths related to pregnancies and childbirth?
Wonder how many of "609 women a year" received HPV vaccines prior to conception .. or .. annual flu vaccines while pregnant?
Why would anyone want to "connect THOSE dots"?
AND THE BAND PLAYS ON ....
Posted by: Bob Moffitt | May 03, 2014 at 02:10 PM
Unfortunately for us, I've read that while boys are more affected, girls are not immune, and that girls tend to be more severely affected by autism than boys. My daughter is the lowest-verbal student in her autism class at middle school.
And I've read that the SAT has been "recentered" twice in recent decades because average performance on it has gone down so much. I agree with you that vaccine damage is much more pervasive than is generally recognized, and affects brain function even when overall performance is considered within the "normal" range. The problem is when the average keeps falling lower and lower. I didn't believe it when I read several years ago that every vaccine did some amount of brain damage in everyone, but now I do.
Posted by: cia parker | May 03, 2014 at 01:16 PM
Were the first ethyl mercury pesticides also organophosphate pesticides or were those two birds of a different feather?
Posted by: Adam M | May 03, 2014 at 01:13 PM
Dan-O, thanks as always for the big picture. And for filling in the mainstream media hole where, North Korean style, the “other gangsters” are air brushed out. Next dot? Waiting …
Posted by: Dan Burns | May 03, 2014 at 11:15 AM
Also more boys than girls have more complication with Kawasaki disease.
More boys than girls have Kawasaki disease.
Kawasakis foundations, organizations, clubs, websites are doing a big push -- to get the CDC to track this disease.
I don't see how they are going to track it -- since most doctors don't know what it is when they run across it -- esp the milder types of this disease.
Things are changing -- only took 30 years - to decide it involves the stomach too - hmmm -- as well as all the other organs.
They are still looking for the virus, fungus, yeast, bacteria, protzoan that set the immune sytem off - and gave kids Kawaskis too. (An Eye roll here -- too-- lots of eye rolls -- lots and lots -- as in anie xty is causeing stomach problems what is causing all that aniexty that our autism kids have -- ) .
Since the Gardisil girls all have vasculiitis the CDC I am sure does not need another data base - to have to pay another company to keep out of the prying eyes of Geiger and Geiger.
I also wonder what effect of the diease of bipolar would have on the absorption of ambien?
Posted by: Benedetta | May 03, 2014 at 11:10 AM
Also more boys than girls have complication with Kawasaki disease.
More boys than girls have Kawasaki disease.
Kawasakis foundations, organizations, clubs, websites are doing a big push -- to get the CDC to track this disease.
I don't see how they are going to track it -- since most doctors don't know what it is when they run across it -- esp the milder types of this disease.
THings are changing -- only took 30 years - to decide it involves the stomach too - hmmm -- as well as all the other organs.
Since the Gardisil girls all have vasculiitis the CDC I am sure does not need another data base - to have to pay another company to keep out of the prying eyes of Geiger and Geiger.
Posted by: Benedetta | May 03, 2014 at 10:58 AM
Ambien; I wonder what the drug protzac has on ambien --????
Does protaza cancel out ambien. Inquiring minds wants to know.
Been through that one last summer.
Posted by: Benedetta | May 03, 2014 at 10:45 AM
Oops. I meant Ted Kennedy would ROLL over...didn't proof read carefully.
Posted by: CT teacher | May 03, 2014 at 10:17 AM
Excellent article Dan! The societal impacts of the autism crisis are huge and collapse is certain. Our kids will leave an enormous void but our see no evil government is not seeing it yet the outlook for the future of our country is grim.. There will not be enough teachers, engineers, doctors, policemen, soldiers. Homelessness and poverty will soar. Our days as a superpower are already over. I watched a news story yesterday that 1 in 5 children have a mental illness!!! Our country will be vulnerable because our children, our greatest resource, won't be able to defend it. Our country is under attack and has been for sometime. Disrupt, disable, destroy...9.11 was disrupt, the autism crisis is the disable and our destruction is next.
Mental health awareness on the front line
May 1, 2014 KTRK – Houston
One out of five children can have mental disorders, and schools are starting to show teachers how to ID them and help students
http://news.yahoo.com/video/mental-health-awareness-front-line-234228921.html?bcmt=comments-postbox
Posted by: autismparent | May 03, 2014 at 10:04 AM
Dot: a small area that is different from the main part.
Connector: that which joins 2 or more things together
It dawns on me that all the best progress in life is made by dot connectors. And a good deal of evil in the world, too. Maybe if there was an important sounding title for "dot connector" that came attached to good pay and copyrights exclusivity allopathic medicine would offer MDs some kind of continuing education credits in how to be a good dot connector. Is the word doctor some latin or greek word for dot connector? It has all the same letters. Maybe eventually just a glance at a name tag would be enough to tell if you had a good doctor - any doctor with a specialty in dot connecting would be an M:D:, instead of an M.D.
I hope good dot connectors are faster at it than me, though. Despite everything I've learned from this site and others like it, I just connected 2 dots today that are ideas everyone else here probably already understood. I asked myself why why why such an attack on Wakefield? Over and over and over again. Even within the vaccine "controversy" why the MMR? I mean, it's not going to be long before we know that like the pertussis, and the mumps, measles has probably morphed in the natural environment, too, having become vaccine resistant, or whatever protein is used as the target of the vaccine has morphed, but MMR questioning seems disproportionately off limits, repeatedly.
It dawns on me that the MMR did NOT have the thimerosol in it. So the MMR is THE smoking gun against the polypharmacy approach of the vaccine schedule. But the quickest way to the largest profits will come through combination vaccines. There are just too many of them in the pipeline to be able to administer them all separately. We might spend decades taking all the toxins out of vaccines to make them safer, and significantly reduce the numbers of vaccine adverse events, but if the numbers level off, and then start increasing again as the number of "non-toxic" vaccines are added the the schedule (as they tend to do) then it indicts
the ENTIRE practice of vaccinology. Because the schedule really is EASILY adjusted and controlled by human decision and at that point (when they become non-toxic) not adjusting it won't be able to be blamed on slow science and the need to examine toxicity, it will become apparent that the reasons for any adverse events are basically the vaccines themselves, combined with greed and lack of respect for human life and dignity. At that point, if people still have the right to decline medical interventions, the vaccine industry will be up shit creek. I'm sure they know that, yet they continue to base their future revenues on vaccine development. Therefore they have to make coercive vaccination seem acceptable now, BEFORE toxicity is removed. All because the MMR is dangerous WITHOUT containing mercury. And if the MMR caused more damage than getting measles and mumps and rubella separately and spread out by months, then their entire approach and investments in FUTURE combo vaccines is unsustainable. It CAN'T be successful WITHOUT government mandated combo vaccines. And on top of that, if mumps (and measles, too) show how fast the microbes can morph and make a vaccine ineffective, that means CONTINUED need for financial investment and updating - which digs into profits even faster than a lawsuit. Yep, the MMR is the smoking gun for the entire industry, for the most serious reason: money.
Boy vs girls - such a large topic. Great points, Bob. So the question is - is it dose dependent or is it possible that boys simply cannot be vaccinated due to their innate differences without an entirely new line of vaccines. If dose dependent, and boys could reap the benefits of vaccines and lose the problems just of getting a smaller dose, would the government still pay the pharmaceutical companies the same amount for the vaccine, despite the dosage changes. If a lot of the reactions and types of reaction to vaccines are dependent on hormonal cycles that's a great line of investigation. Though autism is more prevalent in boys, there are other auto immune conditions that are more prevalent in girls. Hormone cycles change with age, so vaccine scheduling could, hypothetically, eventually be done according to hormone testing results. If testosterone, progesterone, estrogen, insulin & D3 are in line today, you may get such and such vaccine, but not until. Fast blood prick tests would be needed, like the insulin tests for diabetes.
Posted by: Jenny | May 03, 2014 at 09:16 AM
I agree that vaccines are probably the biggest contributor to these conditions and that they affect more boys than girls. I also agree that pesticides are big culprits as well. It certainly doesn't help that everyone has to have green lawns either. The chemicals that are used for this purpose are deadly, but they are not outlawed by the EPA and they should be. Up until recently, these chemicals were used on school properties. Thankfully, CT has discontinued this stupid practice, but their widespread use on private property is allowed. What are we thinking? We are causing widespread environmental disaster and destroying our health in the bargain.
The New York Times article failed to examine the role of the school curriculum, itself, as a causative factor in the rise of ADD and ADHD in young boys. Girls do better than boys in Kindergarten and the primary grades simply because they are ready for the kinds of activities that are involved. Many boys are not yet ready for academic activities that involve reading, writing and sitting still. Schools used to take readiness into account, so Kindergarten was primarily a place to socialize and do readiness activities for the academic work that would follow in 1st grade. Now, with all the focus on standardized testing, there is no time for preparation. Kids must learn to read and write in Kindergarten, ready or not. This is very stressful for little kids, especially boys. The standardized testing now begins in Kindergarten. How stressful is that?
The practice of practicing to take tests consumes the school curriculum in the primary grades where children are simply not ready for this. The curriculum has become boring with little emphasis on social studies and science and no time for interesting lessons that help kids to make connections to their daily lives or to the world around them. It is drill, baby, drill.
So what do you think happens when boys are unable to sit quietly and do all of this boring pencil and paper work? You guessed it! They get diagnosed with ADD or ADHD or learning disabilities or dyslexia and on and on the list goes. If that doesn't happen to them, they are so turned off to school that the harm may be irreparable. For those that are diagnosed with disorders, however, medication is almost always suggested. Then the harm done has truly frightening consequences because so many of these meds are linked to violence and aggression.
NCLB has not only destroyed the public school system, it is contributing to the destruction of young male minds as well. Ted Kennedy would role over in his grave if he knew what this piece of legislation that he helped to create has really done to the schools and to kids in general.
So, boys are taking the major hit on many fronts and we need to do something about it because the very fabric of our society depends on our doing so.
Posted by: CT teacher | May 03, 2014 at 09:03 AM
Dan, Much of my career involved being a technology "troubleshooter", brought in (hired) to resolve major glitches or serious design flaws in a new product on the verge of production, and then demonstrate solution(s).
Almost always the principle obstacle to solutions were the original design engineers and technicians that could never properly re-evaluate their designs and/or analyses. They simply had made up their minds, or had no true capacity to reappraise what they had skillfully designed (in their own minds) - and they had their own reputations to protect.
I'm afraid this is even more true in the world of medicine (for example, as you and Mark made abundantly clear re mercury, in your book Age of Autism).
It's very clear, today, such highly positioned medicos as those heading up NIH (NIAID), CDC, etc., will NEVER honestly reappraise their dogmatic belief in the vaccination-caused carnage they have inflicted.
And, our Presidents (irregardless of their being 'conservative' or 'liberal') have always been under the spell of NIH & CDC "experts." Of course, the humongous money made by vaccine makers (and the humongous tax dollars funded by Congress to NIH & CDC) are also at stake.
It seems our major hopes rest on an unrelenting grassroots effort such as AoA et al., along with an increasing percentage of hands-on doctors who acknowledge vaccines' toxicities. Clearly, we can never give up.
Posted by: david m burd | May 03, 2014 at 08:11 AM
A few weeks ago .. "60 Minutes" had a segment hosted by Leslie Stahl titled: "Sex Matters: Drugs can affect sexes differently"
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/sex-matters-drugs-can-affect-sexes-differently/
It began stating "Earlier this year, the FDA made an unusual and surprising announcement. It cut the recommended dose of the most popular sleep drug in the country, Ambien, in half for women. It turns out men and women metabolize Ambien, very differently, leaving women with more of the drug in their bodies the next morning, and therefore at greater risk of impaired driving"
Larry Cahill, a neuroscientist at Univ of Cal Irvine, used to share his field's assumption that males and females outside the reproductive system were fundamentally the same. But he's changed his outlook 180 degrees.
Ambien has been on the market for twenty years .. and .. fairly recently did the FDA discover that women were being prescribed .. a dose twice as high as they need. What is really troubling is the revelation the FDA's original review of Ambien back in 1992 contained a page called "Effect of Gender" where the FDA reviewer noted two key measures of how much drug is in the bloodstream "were approximately 45 percent higher in females than in males".
What did they do? Nothing. Because .. according to the FDA spokesperson .. "there was no evidence the difference (sex) mattered. Back then, when someone said "women's health" it usually meant what they call "bikini medicine" .. breast and ovarian cancer, pregnancy, menstual cycles. But for parts of the body men and women share .. hearts, kidneys, the brain .. most studies were done predominately on men".
Larry Cahill .. "if you're clumping men and women together in your study and there truly is a sex difference, you're not just harming the women, you're harming the men. You're muddling up the understanding of what's going on. You're muddling up the path to clear treatment, not just for the women, but for the men as well. The problem is that the scientific establishment hasn't caught up with its own discoveries. We really need to go back and review .. pretty much everything, because once you see this difference and that difference and that difference .. this thing is everywhere. So the assumption we're making that it really doesn't matter, sex, is not a valid assumption. It may not matter, it may matter hugely. Once you realize that .. "wow. The status quo is not OK. the way we're doing business now has to change".
This was a fascinating "60 Minutes" and well worth at least reading the transcript found at the address listed above.
Remember .. Larry Cahill was speaking primarily about prescription drugs .. one can only imagine how sex interferes with the tolerance of multiple vaccines full of differing chemicals .. including known toxins.
Posted by: Bob Moffitt | May 03, 2014 at 07:06 AM
I read that NYT article too, and thought of Boyd Haley, who has been talking about the differential success between boys and girls for years.
This morning, my (relatively NT) son takes the SAT, and I'm sure that girls outdo the boys on that too.
Of course Haley (and the rest of us here) are right. As well as 30% of the public. I pray the truth will be widely recognized in my lifetime.
Posted by: beth johnson | May 03, 2014 at 06:47 AM
Edge of the seat reading.. awesome article! Thanks.
Posted by: Mike Robinson | May 03, 2014 at 06:15 AM